The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for locating documents with a high level of correlating information to a target document that includes patent content.
In industry, there is a general need to acquire and determine the value of business assets. As an example, there is a need to determine the value of intellectual property assets, such as patents. It is also important to efficiently and effectively leverage such valuable assets in the worldwide marketplace. As another example, a company would benefit from better identifying research and development (RandD) expenditures that need to be productized within certain marketing time periods.
In general, corporations have numerous assets and revenue potentials that require independent and effective management. Taking the example of a patent portfolio, a single company may have thousands of issued patents in hundreds of different technological areas. One method of managing such a large patent portfolio, includes training and utilizing human resources in order to employ a manual management approach. Such a manual approach is time consuming, prone to human error, not timely in its execution, costly, and resource limited. While large searchable computer databases may be helpful for managing corporate assets like patents, such databases are passive engines that are only as good as their user""s intuition and knowledge base, and these databases typically have interfaces that require a significant amount of costly human interaction.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved methodology for managing corporate assets, such as a large patent portfolio or RandD expenditures.